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Al Pacino or Robert De Niro? The Beatles or The Rolling Stones? Kate or Rooney Mara? Pop culture is littered with dichotomies at the top; which one you prefer probably says more about you than it does about either party.
Tom Brady versus Peyton Manning has been perhaps the NFL’s best example of this.
Brady is the sun-soaked California kid with supermodel good looks, the supermodel Brazilian wife, and the icy cool movie-star presence in the pocket. All he does is win.
Manning is Brady’s awkward looking Edward Norton-with-a-larger-forehead counterpart. He’s from the Deep South and has never been ‘cool’ – his most famous idiosyncrasy has always been how his feet jitter behind the line, the fitting progression from the constant, furious motion of his mouth in calling audibles before the snap. All he does is win regular-season games.
The Brady-Manning rivalry has often been painted along these lines, with Manning playing the Salieri to Brady’s Mozart. The reason is simple: athletes are defined by their wins, and Brady has a lot more important wins than Manning. He’s 11-5 against Manning when they’ve matched up, and he has four Super Bowl rings to Manning’s one. There is plenty of noise in those numbers, but no amount of noise can obscure their basic reality.
This weekend Manning has the opportunity to make the noise loud enough to restart the conversation. Manning might be 5-11 against Brady, but he’s 2-2 in the playoffs and 2-1 in AFC championship games. If he can bump those stats up to 3-2, 3-1 and close the Super Bowl gap to 2-4, Manning’s loftier regular-season stats and five MVPs to Brady’s two might solidify his argument to be thought of not just as Brady’s equal or superior, but as the greatest NFL quarterback of all time.
But maybe none of this matters. The Brady-Manning rivalry is the perfect encapsulation of how we define legacies by elements of a player’s career that they have no control over.
If Brady loses to Manning this weekend it will likely not be because Manning is better than him, it will be because Denver’s defence is vastly superior to New England’s. And if Manning had spent his entire career with Bill Belichick, and not Jim Mora, Tony Dungy, Jim Caldwell, John Fox and Gary Kubiak, the narrative of his rivalry with Brady would be turned on its head. Therein lies the fallacy of an individual rivalry within a team sport.
The narrative of Brady versus Manning is only as compelling as our obsession with it. Our need to anoint a singular king is rarely echoed as clearly as it is here. Context is the bane of a simple narrative’s existence, and in this case it destroys any possibility to objectively deduce who is the superior player. It mostly just comes down to a matter of taste.
Taste is prone to change though, and every new event can change its flavour and colour its lingering sensations. If Manning beats Brady on the weekend, it will reinforce the power of his epic 38-34 2007 AFC title game victory, and the infamous fourth and two win in 2009. It will also mean Brady will be 1-5 lifetime in title games against the Manning family.
If Brady wins, the beat goes on. If he wins the week after too, the jig is up and the debate is over. A 12-5 head-to-head record and five Super Bowls to one isn’t a rivalry; it’s the relationship between a hammer and a nail.
Those are the stakes of this weekend, and while there will be 21 other players on the field at every moment, the biggest takeaway from the match, as always, will be who wins out of Brady and Manning. In a sport that deifies the quarterback, there is little glory left for the Julian Edelmans and Aqib Talibs of the world.
Perhaps it’s unfair, disproportionately weighted and ultimately misguided, but the Brady-Manning narrative is still as enthralling as any in sports, and Sunday will likely be its final chapter. We tend to remember great players more easily than we remember great teams, and this weekend will be one last tantalising opportunity for Brady and Manning to reinforce how we remember them, both individually and in comparison with one another. The pair is so powerful that they’ve subsumed their teams, and Denver versus New England feels no different than Indianapolis versus New England.
The narrative of Brady-Manning might be flawed, but that doesn’t make it any less absorbing. Because as silly as it might be, if Peyton Manning is down four late, driving into New England territory, there will be a shot of Tom Brady on the sideline at the two-minute warning, and it will be absolutely marvellous.